The anecdote is well known: Asghar Farhadi did not travel to collect the Oscar for Best Foreign Film that he was awarded in 2017 for The Salesman (2016), in protest against the executive order of Donald Trump's government, which imposed strong entry barriers, and even a total veto, on travellers from seven Muslim countries, including Iran. Based on this real event, the young filmmaker Hassan Nazer imagined what would have happened if the statuette that Farhadi was unable to receive in hand had been lost on the way to Tehran. Winners (2022), a dramatic comedy that conceals much more beneath its simple surface, is above all a passionate homage to cinema, both the fascination it arouses and the wounds it inflicts. For this story of a lost Oscar can be understood, if one thinks about it carefully, as a requisition against the misery and internal repression experienced by Iran's citizens, including its greatest filmmakers. Focusing the narrative on a couple of children from a poor region in the interior of Iran who, although fascinated by cinema, are unfamiliar with its paraphernalia and tinsel, Nasser extracts all the dignity of characters living in misery, for whom cinema is just a crack that allows them to imagine another life, or to recreate past splendours. Nazer dedicates this metaphilmic movie to Kiarostami, Panahi, Majidi and Farhadi (one of whom, we will not reveal who, will make an important cameo...), and testifies to the importance of cinema as an international lingua franca, and as a source of emancipation and fraternity. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH GONZÁLEZ